Assorted Nonsense

Recently I lost all my old posts when my blog saw fit to self-destruct. Over the next little while I’m going to republish my favourite posts, along with the comments on them. Starting with this one:

I have many friends who are serious Christians. As a staunch, rather agnostic liberal, I find the views of my Christian friends fascinating. I do not mean to sound patronizing; my closest Christian friends are invariably highly intelligent and their views are well considered and deeply felt. That I don’t happen to share their beliefs does not in any way undermine my respect for these people on a personal level.

There are some aspects to the beliefs of some of them, however, that I don’t supposed I will ever understand. An example is the belief that the Bible must be taken literally. It happens that I am well acquainted with the Bible, having been brought up a practising Catholic, lapsed since the age of about eighteen. And I simply cannot comprehend how anyone even remotely familiar with the Bible, especially intelligent, well educated people, could possibly take it literally.

My wife is a practising Protestant and I wouldn’t begin to presume to speak for her beliefs, except to say that she is a smart woman, much smarter than me. She attends a Protestant Church. When we got married I promised her that if we could find a church that didn’t make me feel too uncomfortable I would attend with her. Because I love her and I am a family man, I do. The congregation at large doesn’t know my feelings on religion, although I would tell them if they asked. The Pastor knows exactly how I feel.

This is by way of explaining how it was I found myself sitting in a church pew when the Pastor (again, a man whom I respect despite our different views) mentioned the death of Judas. “We all know,” he said, “How Judas hung himself.”

Those of you who know the Bible will already know where I’m going with this. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Judas did indeed hang himself. However, according to Acts, Judas purchased a field of land with his thirty pieces of silver, and one day when he was out in that field his bowels burst open and spilled out onto the field and that was the end of Judas.

How many times and in how many ways is it possible for a man to die? Did he hang himself or did his bowels burst open in a field? It’s one or the other. Either Matthew or Acts is wrong. If either one of them is wrong, then the Bible is fallible and must not be taken literally.

By pointing this out I do not mean to suggest that the Bible must be discarded. Not by a long shot. The Bible is a fascinating historical document, filled with much wisdom. Much of our culture, our art and literature cannot be completely understood except in the context of the Bible. Nor am I disparaging Christianity.

I’m simply suggesting that if you’re going to adhere to a faith, you owe it to yourself and your deity of choice to do so with your eyes wide open.

Addendum: My father and a friend have pointed out that the two versions of Judas’ death are not necessarily incompatible, that in the act of being hanged one might well spill one’s bowels onto a field, or if not instantly, then after a few days exposure to the elements. However, Acts pretty much excludes the possibility that Judas hanged himself. Here are the two passages in question:

Judas Hanged Himself:

Early in the morning, all the chief priests and the elders of the people came to the decision to put Jesus to death. They bound him, led him away and handed him over to Pilate, the governor. When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty silver coins to the chief priests and the elders. “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.” “What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.” So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. (Matthew 27:1-5 NIV)

Judas Didn’t Hang Himself–He Died from a Fall:

In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) and said, “Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through the mouth of David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus–he was one of our number and shared in this ministry.” With the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. (Acts 1:15-18 NIV)

By examining these two passages so literally I no doubt appear, ironically, to be making the mistake of taking the Bible too literally myself. My point is that what wisdom there is to be found in the Bible (of which there is a great deal) is not to be gleaned by adhering mindlessly to each and every word. In fact, doing so virtually guarantees misinterpretation, in my humble opinion.

14 Responses to “The Deaths of Judas”
Grondzilla Says:
November 27th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
You bring up one of the points about most religions that has always led me down the road of atheism, that being Dogma. The desperate need for immutability in the face of a life, world and universe that is so obviously hell bent on transition always seems to me a rather naive thing. That the bible should actually be taken at face value is what we call in professional circles ‘crazy talk’. What has always puzzled me the most is how many (maybe most) people of religion who I know tend to think that our limited understanding of the whole dealymcbobber is somehow a recipe for despair, cured only it seems, by having ‘faith’ in a higher meaning/power/love (the last one of course primarily reserved for Steve Winwood fans).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not down on personal choice and self deception (which I practice every day to some extent) but I get as prickly as hell when an individuals personal ’spirituality’ has to project outward. One of my mottos:

Be Religious, knock yourself out…but when your religion starts telling *me* how to be a better person cause you’ve got a list of rules from the great Juju in the sky it’s time to as, they say in La Belle France, “Ferme le Hole du Pie” (You’ll have to excuse my french, I can never remember if it’s supposed to be ‘le’ or ‘la’ Pie Hole).

Paul Darcy Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 2:18 am
Okay, here I am, not a religious man in any sense (somewhat spiritual perhaps, but not following any religion in any sense, or attending church, or assuming the lotus positions, etc, etc.) and when I read your Judas post I thought, hey - he could die several ways.

Many ways - maybe even an infinite number of ways. Why not?

You see, if you believe (oh, oh, I used the “B” word!) in the “Many Worlds Interpretation Of Quantum Mechanics” (this is a real book published by Princeton Univerity Press and edited by Bryce S. Dewitt and Neill Graham) then the universe we live in is but one of many contnually branching off complete universes, so it is possible for Judas to be swinging from a rope in one of them while using his guts as fertalizer in another universe with equal validity.

And looking at it in that way, maybe the “Bible” was giving us glimpses into the many worlds quantum mechanic idea and we have only to look beyond the words to interpret it?

And this may only be so much horse hockey.

Joe Mahoney Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 3:15 am
I knew I could count on you guys for a response to that one. But you never fail to surprise… the many worlds theory to account for Judas’ deaths! All right, so maybe he did die twice. But that would only open up another whole can of worms. A universe in which Eve didn’t take the forbidden fruit, or another in which Judas didn’t betray Christ…

Paul Darcy Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 3:27 am
Or how about the world where Mary had a miscarriage?

Um, am I going to burn extra long in Hell for that one?

AndrewC Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 7:44 am
Joe, try sending a 13 year old to an all boys private catholic school and have him ask you if the Bible is real or not, it seemed to him it couldn’t be. My only answer is its a book of stories, based on fact and myths, that you can use or not to help you out on how you are going to approach life. He told me he doesn’t care if he is called a good catholic or not, but wants to be known as a good person. That is all I can ask.

Joe Mahoney Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 8:30 am
That’s pretty good, Andrew. Paul, on the other hand, is clearly going to hell in a handbasket…

Tom Kernaghan Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 9:19 am
Interesting discussion, everyone. My formal Catholic education ended with grade 8. After that I went to a public high school. I leaf through the Bible from time to time, but I think I would need to delve much deeper before wading into an exegetical discussion.

My beliefs are still up in the air. However, I do enjoy exploring the spiritual side of life.

Christian writer C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity” (paraphrasing): Just because a person, labouring in error or foolishness, says that 2 + 2 equals 5, this doesn’t negate the fact that 2 + 2 does in fact equal 4…. And the very fact that imperfect creatures such as humans can conceive of perfection is in fact evidence that it exists outside of us and comes to us from a supreme source.

I think he was invoking Descartes here. Persuasive, perhaps, though not conclusive.

As for the two Judas stories… I don’t know. I like Paul’s quantum mechanics idea. I must admit I’ve pondered it myself. It is fascinating! St. Augustine looked wrote that a supreme deity sees all possibilities as a snapshot, whereas we inferior mortals are only capable of dealing with one at a time. So the Bible’s inconsistencies may be evidence of God talking to chosen mortals. Or physics talking to mortals (chosen or not).

Again, fascinating. But I’m still agnostic.

Anonymous Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 11:06 am
Good use of the word “exegetical”, Tom. I’m afraid explaining away inconsistencies in the Bible as evidence of a Supreme Being talking only to certain chosen mortals is a bit of a tautology that doesn’t quite work for me, though (not that you were suggesting that definitively).

Joe

desert rat Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Considering how the Bible has been translated so many times, and is available in so many different versions the world over, it seems rather ludicrous that any one version should be taken literally word for word. I’m not even remotely religious, but my grandma is a Jehovah’s witness, I lived with Jewish people for close to a decade (my step-mom and step-sister), my uncle was a minister, and I sang in my friend’s Presbetyrian church choir as a kid. So I’ve been exposed to quite a lot of religion. I found the people who always made sense to me were ones who understood the ideas of context, metaphor and parable. I’d grown up knowning Bible stories but I was a teenager when I first tried to read the Bible as a book (since so many literary and other works refer to it). I had to stop because it essentially started 3 different times - each time contradicting itself. Many years later, in university, a friend showed me a new translation of the Bible which interpreted the whole thing as poetry. I never did get to read more than a few passages from it, but it was beautiful, and made a heck of a lot more sense than any other version I’d seen. Considering also how many other versions of Bible stories there are - movies, plays, pageants, and so on. Surely every religious work is open to a certain amount of interpretation, if it is to remain relevant to any one.

Tom Kernaghan Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 1:56 pm
Thanks, Anonymous Joe.

Great, you’ve focused on the glib part of my response. haha. Actually, the tautology you point out doesn’t work for me either. Tautologies are just so taut and tidy, aren’t they? I was appealing to imagination, not logic.

Tom Kernaghan Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 2:29 pm
Joe,

I should clarify that my fascination was not with St. Augustine alone, but his idea of two levels of comprehension reinterpreted in quantum physics, and the fact that our quest continues. I should’ve tied those two things together better in my original response.

Assorted Nonsense » The Scapegoat Says:
November 28th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
[…] Home « The Deaths of Judas […]

Assorted Nonsense » The Famous Bartlet Speech Says:
December 6th, 2005 at 10:53 pm
[…] While we’re on the subject of religion, the following is one of my all time favourite scenes in television. It’s the famous Bartlet Speech from an episode of The West Wing. It pretty much sums up my feelings on the infallibility (or lack thereof) of the Bible. Further information on this scene, including the real life letter that inspired it, can be found here. […]

Lynda Williams Says:
December 12th, 2005 at 12:52 am
Ditto Grondzilla’s comment about dogma. But my most recent insight into the mystery of why intelligent people adhere to dogma that seems, well, a bit like the stuff of oral traditions and fairy tales to the rest of us, is making me reconsider the value of religion for the first time in my life. At least dogma gives you a hard and fast answer to the question “why not just be the biggest asshole on the block”. Increasingly, with media heros like Donald Trump for role models, it would be nice to be able to throw a little hell fire and brimstone around to make a point. Long winded lessons on the importance of trust for posterity and the lessons of social psychology may just be too damn subtle for the smart, greedy people in the world to have soul enough to grasp.

…member of the House of Amber are you?

(I’m Bleys…)

You have read the Chronicles of Amber, haven’t you?  By Roger Zelazny?  No?

Tsk tsk… 

Tired of bumpy ambulance rides? Interminable wait times in Emergency? Trips to local Walk-In Clinics only to find that they’re open, but no longer accepting patients?

Well, there’s a free service available here in Ontario that precious few people seem to know about. It’s called Telehealth Ontario, and they do a wonderful job, but a lousy job of promoting themselves. So it’s up to me to spread the word, it seems.

The concept is simple. Hire a bunch of registered nurses and give them telephones. When people wake up only to find themselves covered in inexplicable purple spots, they have but to phone one of these wonderful nurses to render the spots explicable. Did I mention that it’s free?

I have availed myself of Telehealth Ontario on several occasions. I’ve called when my wife has been sick, when my daughters have been sick, and when I once accidentally stubbed my toe on a door and my toenail fell off. On each instance the nurse who answered the phone was unfailingly polite and thorough. I was asked to answer many questions, during which the nurse assessed the level of emergency. Afterward she issued her advice, and I’m happy to report that all of us got better, and I grew a brand new toenail, which promptly fell off as well (I am currently on my third). It may well be that all of us would have gotten better without the assistance of the nurses, but the reassurance provided was incalculable.

The number to call is 1-866-797-0000.

The next time you’re sick, call it.

You’ll feel better afterward.

Yesterday I engineered my last ever live show. I tell people this and they can’t believe it. They refuse to believe it… they think I’ll be back.

Ain’t gonna happen.

It was the last show I’ll ever engineer for Q. Today my replacement took over. His name is Alain and he’s pretty sharp. About eight times as sharp as me, give or take a sharp or two. So he’s doing it from now on and I’m spending these last few days showing him the ropes, although he’s shown me a rope or two as well. Q is in good hands with this guy.

But it felt pretty strange watching him engineer the show today. I kept wanting to leap in and push buttons. I managed to restrain myself. Our musical guest today was Murray Mclaughlin. I felt a pang when one of our Associate Producers introduced Murray to Alain instead of me, and they discussed how the show was going to go. It was only right… it’s Alain doing the show now, not me.

I’m just going to have to get used to it.

Another week of showing Alain around, then three days of drama work, and on November the second it’s all over. I’m out of the Union. No longer a recording engineer. Moving to the dark side. Becoming a big, bad manager.

Yep…

…it’s gonna take some getting used to.

Courtesy of Edward Willett:

Best Long-Form Work in English
* Children of Chaos, Dave Duncan (Tor Books)

Best Long-Form Work in French
* Reine de Memoire 4. La Princesse de Vengeance,
Elisabeth Vonarburg (Alire)

Best Short-Form Work in English
* “Biding Time,” Robert J. Sawyer (Slipstreams edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, DAW [and also in The Penguin Book of Crime Stories, edited by Peter Robinson])

Best Short-Form Work in French
* “Le regard du trilobite,” Mario Tessier (Solaris 159)

Best Work in English (Other)
* Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine, Karl Johanson, editor

Best Work in French (Other)
* Aux origines des petits hommes verts
Jean-Louis Trudel (Solaris 160)

Artistic Achievement
* Martin Springett [www.martinspringett.com]

Fan Achievement (Publication)
* Brins d’Iterniti, rid. Guillaume Voisine
(www.alegracia.com/brins/faq/faq.php)

Fan Achievement (Organizational)
* Cathy Palmer-Lister (Con*Cept)

Fan Achievement (Other)
* Fractale-Framboise,
Eric Gauthier, Christian Sauve, Laurine Spehner
(blogue/blog)

Next Year’s CanVention: KeyCon 25 in Winnipeg, a four-day con over the Victoria Day weekend.

So there I am, in Moosejaw, with the world’s larget moose (photo courtesy of CBC Regina’s Network Producer Sean Prpick).

I love Moosejaw. It reminds me of towns in the Maritimes. I mentioned this to one woman and she told me that the Prairies and the Maritimes are interchangeable.

“A little windy today,” I mentioned to this same woman.

She said, “It’s always windy.” She told me her Dad had moved to Vancouver, then came back after five years and complained about the wind. She had to go outside and see if it was actually windy. She hadn’t noticed, she was so used to it.

What about the remote? you ask, and rightfully so. That is what we are up here for, after all.

The Moosejaw edition of Q went well, I’m happy to report. Two egregious errors were made, though, one by myself and one by Jian. I was playing back some IDs and themes from a laptop, and I didn’t have a mouse (we needed the mouse on a different computer). During the show I was getting ready to play an ID, and placed the cursor over the start button. The damn ID started to play, interrupting Jian.

He said, (and we’re broadcasting this live nationally, remember), “Ah, don’t I have more time?” And I had to stop the ID in the middle. We were in front of a live audience, it was kind of embarrassing. But hey, that’s live for you.

The other mistake worked well for us because it was pretty funny… forgetting for a split second where we were, Jian accidentally called Moosejaw Toronto. The audience thought it was hilarious and in his usual witty fashion Jian ran with it. It became a running joke throughout the show, to the benefit of all.

My mistakes are ugly, brutal affairs… Jian’s are hilarious. It’s the nature of the beast. But it doesn’t get me down, as everyone is so supportive. The only one to mention my mistake afterward was me… everyone else complimented me on a job well done whether I deserved it or not. Plus you just can’t get upset over little stuff like that. Life is too short and it’s only radio.

I’m actually in Regina now. Tomorrow we broadcast out of CBC Regina, then fly home tomorrow afternoon. It will be nice to hang with my family again. I was going a little stir crazy in my hotel room today… had several Canadia scripts to story edit, which kept me cooped up for much of the day.

Although the scripts are shaping up quite well, I think… lots of time travel. And I love time travel.

Even better than cross-country travel.

Moosejaw tomorrow!

It’s not every day you go to Moosejaw.

Then Regina on Sunday and back home Monday. If you want to check up on me, listen to Q Friday (from the Moose) and Monday (from Regina). I’ll be using different gear, different studios, and I expect I’ll screw everything up, so it should be quite entertaining to listen to Jian curse at me on air.

Ah, I can’t wait.

Be blogging at you next week!

Since the unfortunate immolation of this blog last weekend hits have gone way, way, way down.  This is perhaps attributable to the fact that it never was a very good blog to begin with and people have only just now awakened to that fact. 

But while this may very well be true, it’s perhaps also because the original domain name is currently not working.  So folk who have linked to assortednonsense through writerbroadcaster.com, or who are seeking assnon (as it shall henceforth be known in this post) via writerbroadcaster, are SOL for the moment.

However we, the hard working minions behind the relative lack of success of Assnon, are working hard to remedy the situation and should have writerbroadcaster.com back up and running within the decade. 

In the meantime, if you would be so kind, please tell your friends, family, colleagues and pets that should they care to while away ten or fifteen seconds during their coffee/dog chow breaks at assortednonsense.com that they should do so at assortednonsense.com and not writerbroadcaster.com, at least until the end of the decade.

This public service announcement has been brought to you free of charge by the United Nonsensical Workers of Canada, otherwise known as UNWC (pronounced “Uhhhnnnkkk).

Cut my face twice shaving this past week. Put in a new blade, began swiping beneath my nose, and… dagnabit! Took a giant nick right out of the side of my nose. Bled like a stuck pig for half an hour.

Two days later, shaving in roughly the same place, and ouch! Sliced off a large swatch of skin directly beneath my right nostril. Bled like a stuck pig for half an hour.

Before that I hadn’t cut myself shaving in years. What could it mean?

I’ll tell you what it meant. It meant we were having our family picture taken this past Sunday, and the God of Family Pictures clearly wanted some kind of blood sacrifice in the photo.

What’s that? It couldn’t have meant that because there is no God of Family Pictures, and even if there was he (she? It?) doesn’t do the blood sacrifice thing in this day and age?

Shows what little you know.

The family picture session went startling well. The girls were behaved, the weather cooperated (it was outside), and the photographer was delighted with the results. Obviously the God of Family Pictures was pleased with my self-inflicted multiple stab wounds to the face, which can easily be photoshopped out.

What’s that? Have we seen the results of the family picture yet? Well no…

But I’m sure they’re just fine.

How do I know?

Because I left that kind of vanity behind me long, long ago. (Last Thursday, if I recall.)

As long as one of my eyes is at least half open in the picture, I’ll be ecstatic.

And I will be adhering to it in every way, shape and form.  I especially appreciate that they reference the CBC Blogging Manifesto  in a postive way:

October 12, 2007